Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

Well friends, if you (like me) went ahead and upgraded to Karmic but failed to disable any restricted or 3rd party drivers, you may encounter problems.

I have a home-built PC that has an nvidia GeForce 5500 AGP video card, and I use the restricted nvidia drivers. I forgot to disable them before I upgraded. I had downloaded the Alternate Installation ISO via bittorrent, so I was all prepared to skip the network install headaches.

The install went fine, but when I rebooted, my screen was flashing so violently that I could not even log in. The GUI logon screen wasn't even presented. Things were so whacky, my system wasn't even fully booting, so I couldn't SSH to it from another machine!

How I fixed this

Luckily, I had a bootable Knoppix CD. I was able to boot into Knoppix, mount my Karmic system's HDD as read/write, and go into etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the driver from nvidia to nv (the one that comes with Ubuntu). Once I did that, I was able to boot into Karmic with no problems.

Re: Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

I upgraded netbook remix on my Dell Mini 9 with the 3rd party Broadcom driver in use. I had no option since it was being used for my connection. It posed no problem for me. But as I said, I had no choice.

Re: Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

I did a clean install and when I activated restricted Nvidia driver and rebooted, I had same shaking screen w/no login. Unfortunately, I could not restart as it seems to have killed my mobo. Asus m2n32-sli deluxe with 7600gt cards in sli. Probably should have stuck w/9.04 for a while.

Re: Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

Ok, I am booted to an old Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD. It also operates only in text mode. How do I find and mount the hard disk rw so I can edit the config? I have tried "sudo mount -nrw /dev/sda4" but it responds that /dev/sda4 cannot be found in /etc/fstab.

Or, alternatively, how do I boot to "recovery mode"? I assume that would be booting to the hard disk.

Re: Did you upgrade to Karmic before disabling restricted or 3rd party drivers?

Ok, I have my PC booted into GUI mode after booting in recovery mode and editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, as described in the first post of this thread.

However, it is still not using the nVidia driver. How do I properly install the nVidia driver for 9.10 without getting it all fouled up, again. I seem to have the understanding that, with 9.10, I am no longer supposed to download the proprietart driver from nVidia's website and install it myself. What am I supposed to do, instead?